We held our second lab meeting of 2015 on April 1st, and had near-record turnout.
Notes from the Etherpad are included below;
the highlights are:

We hope to have a first-quarter financial report by the end of this month.
The good news is that there's lots of interest in partnerships and affiliations;
the bad is that we're not collecting admin fees from nearly as many workshops as we need to.

We will charge for-profit organizations four times as much for organizing workshops as we charge universities and other non-profits;
the extra money will be used to underwrite workshops for places that otherwise might not be able to afford to host them.

We have created a LinkedIn group
for Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry instructors —
if you're a LinkedIn user, you're welcome to join.
Leigh Sheneman and Lynne Williams have volunteered to moderate the group.

Peter van Heusden and Gabriel Devenyi have volunteered to help with system administration —
our thanks to Jon Pipitone and David Rio for all their help over the past couple of years.

Noam Ross is putting together a lesson on how to get unstuck,
and Christina Koch is managing work on some extra Unix shell material.

We hope to have the current lessons tidied up by the end of April
so that we can give them DOIs,
and thereby make it easier for everyone who has contributed to them
to get proper credit for their work.

(Aleksandra: Leigh, let us know if you'd like support from one more person; basically, feel free to send a note on Discuss)

Managing the flood of email

One solution is change the way that we manage the groups. All instructors are in one group that have read/write access to all the lessons. We are going to split this into small groups (one for lesson) so that people don't get all email notification by default.

Gabriel Devenyi volunteers for GitHub group testing

Need a new sys admin volunteer

Peter van Heusden <pvh@sanbi.ac.za>

Gabriel Devenyi <gdevenyi@gmail.com>

Noam Ross is working on a few improvements for the R lesson like: where learners can get help after the workshop, how they can solve their own problem, ... Started a repo, https://github.com/noamross/zero-dependency-problems, where he is gathering examples from various fora and workshops of the types of things that typical students run into. Interested in contributions from people -- directly from student questions -- also for feedback on lessons, in terms of what material has already been covered, minimal reproducible examples. A question is how much this should be independent material versus being exercises/materials incorporated into Novice Lessons. Short term hope: people contribute example of questions/problems. Where do beginners hit a wall? How beginners should ask the questions? Everything is R: would be nice to have Python, Shell, SQL, ... as well. Some of the material might end up being good examples/exercises.

Greg: SWC and Data Carpentry exists also to have these non-technical questions answered.

Christina Koch revive the idea of extra material for our lessons. This is a experimental. This week we had a email thread about the need to drop some things from our lessons and move it to extra or something similar.

We want to have our novice lessons stable at the end of April to have a DOI.